Common Questions and Answers

Yes! To help you stay in compliance with FCC regulations, Robodial will automatically remove cell phones from your phone lists. This includes phone numbers assigned directly to wireless carriers, as well as phone numbers that have been transferred from a land-line to a wireless carrier.

The FCC's regulations against robocalls to cell phones apply to ALL ROBOCALLS, including political calls and nonprofit calls. If you robocall a cell phone without permission from the owner of the cell phone, you can be sued for as much as $1,500 per call.

Stay safe and legal! Be sure to ask your current robocall service if they are removing cell phones from your phone lists!

We can accept most types of Excel spreadsheets, as well as CSV and TXT files.

Your phone numbers can be in any column, and can use a variety of common formats, including hyphens, parenthesis, and periods. For example all of these phone number formats will be recognized by our system:

Absolutely! That's something we spent a great deal of time engineering and fine tuning over the years, and as a result we've had many clients say our system does a better job than our competitors. We also provide tuning options so that you can leave messages ONLY to voicemail machines if you like.

Best of all, we don't charge anything for these extras. It's built into our published price!

Absolutely! If we use your organization's phone number as the Caller ID, then the phone company will display the Caller ID Name (CNAM) associated with that number.

Or if you prefer, we can use one of our Caller ID phone numbers and set the matching Caller ID Name to your organazation name (up to 15 characters long). This requires at least 24 hours notice, as it takes time for CNAM changes to propagate through the phone system.

You can, but we don't recommend it. A lot of people may call you back, so your cell phone might be tied up for a few days, and burn a lot of minutes. Also, with cell phones the Caller ID Name (CNAM) will usually be something generic like "Wireless Caller".

The easiest way to make a robocall recording is to use our automated Recording Studio. When you submit a robocall request, you'll get a reply email with our Recording Studio phone number along with a PIN number.

If you have a recording you made yourself or from a studio, we can use that too. Just send it with your phone list when you fill out the Get Started form:

When your robocall is finished, our system will automatically send you a spreadsheet listing each called phone number, the time that number was called, and the result of the call (i.e. Respondent Listened to Full Message, Respondent Listened to Part of Message, Number out of Service, No Answer, etc).

It depends. For a poll Monday through Thursday evenings are probably best.

For a robocall with specific instructions (like a robocall listing early-voting locations), a weekday call between 9am and 2pm is best. Why? Because you'll want to hit as many voicemail systems as possible. This allows people to play your message multiple times to accurately get the information you provided. This can also be a good strategy if you want people to visit your web site.

Keep in mind that if you send a robocall during Monday Night Football or during a popular prime time TV show, then more people are likely to hang up without listening to your message.

They work like this: We call each number on your phone list and play your pre-recorded poll questions one by one. After playing each question, we wait for a touch-tone response and record the result. After the poll is finished, we send you a report with your poll results.

Robopolls can be tricky to setup correctly. It's important to structure the questions correctly or the results won't be useful. When you go through the Get Started form to setup a robopoll, we'll send you a script for a typical automated poll. Our personnel will also review your poll questions and give you tips if they notice a problem.

If you prefer, Robodial can design and make your poll recordings for you for an additional fee.

We've done robocalls for organizations with as few as 30 phone numbers. Without our small $15 setup fee, it would not be cost effective for us to do those kinds of calls, and we would have to refuse them just like all of our competitors do.

The setup fee lets us serve small customers that everyone else ignores.

Yes. We tried it the other way, and found that we got too many phone lists with randomly-generated phone numbers. Carriers hate that because it ties up phone lines with calls to invalid phone numbers. They would probably pull the plug on us if we did it, so we don't. Instead we charge a low flat rate per phone number. This way, the cleaner your phone list is, the less you pay us per completed call.

Keep in mind that most households have an answering machine or voicemail of some sort, so the number of non-connects is lower than you might think.

After your robocall is finished we'll send you a report with status-code for each phone number. That will help you cleanse your phone list for future robocalls, and save you money in the long run.

Robodial will not resell your phone lists, robocall results, robopoll results, or recordings to anyone. Robodial will keep customer data confidential and will only comply with government agencies through specific court orders or established statutes that comply with the United States Constitution. The details are spelled out in our Terms of Service, which you must agree to at checkout time.